How Mario Ciabarra is reimagining customer experiences for the Fortune 100 with Quantum Metric

Mario Ciabarra believes that persistence is his superpower. The Quantum Metric founder and CEO, who sports a white jersey with the company logo on the front, points to his back — boldly printed with the values he lives by: “Passion. Persistence. Integrity.”

He gets his unwavering determination from his parents, who emigrated to the United States from Italy. “I think there’s something about when you land in America, and you find this land of opportunity. The first generation is tough; they work really hard to empower the next generation to create success,” he says.

The result is that Ciabarra, a serial entrepreneur with several ventures under his belt, has built one of the most exciting digital analytics and customer experience platforms in the world: Quantum Metric, which uses AI to test, analyze, and improve customer experience across digital products in real time.

An early flair for entrepreneurship

The youngest of six, Ciabarra has always been competitive. His early ventures included selling candy in school and buying tokens in bulk at the arcade, which he sold for a profit. At summer school, he would arrive at 7 a.m. with donuts to sell to the class. “I was a struggling teenager looking for ways to create wealth at an early age.”

In 1999, Ciabarra graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Penn State University, having studied computer science, molecular biology, and biochemistry. He then landed a job as a consultant at PwC, where he got a front row seat in enterprise software. “I felt the pain that was affecting people from an engineering perspective,” he says.

In 2003, he began working on a new application performance monitoring (APM) tool called DevStream, a precursor to the likes of Dynatrace and Datadog. Just 11 months in, he sold the company to Compuware. 

The deal meant he wouldn’t have to work again, and Ciabarra went travelling for six months.

“I didn’t need more money. But I came to realize, when I got home, that I love what I do, and my passion is creating software and solving problems.”

Quantum Metric is born

After the iPhone launched in 2007, Ciabarra began hacking it to create new user functionalities, founding app businesses Intelliborn and Rock Your Phone. Frustrated by the difficulty of diagnosing customer issues, he grew interested in better ways to track digital experiences.

After selling Rock Your Phone in 2010, a friend introduced him to Tealeaf, sparking his desire to build something even better. He eventually wound down Intelliborn and, in 2015, partnered with renowned hacker David Wang to co-found Quantum Metric, where Wang remains Chief Architect.

The business offers customers a suite of analytics tools that provide enterprises with understanding, efficiency, and control over their digital environments. By the end of the year, they had already signed their first contract.

Their take on analytics was so groundbreaking that when Robert Wenig, the founder of Tealeaf, sold his business that year, he asked to come on board as an advisor. “It was an amazing honor,” says Ciabarra. “He created the category in 1999 as a spin-off from SAP, and he’s saying, ‘You’re better than everybody else.”

After an initial seed round in 2017, Ciabarra hit the investment circuit for a Series A the following year. While attending a conference in Las Vegas, Ciabarra met Rebecca Liu-Doyle, then a junior analyst at Insight.

“I remember her sentence exactly: ‘Your booth is way too big for me to not know who you are.’” 

Swayed by the persistence and determination of Liu-Doyle, now a managing director at Insight Partners, Ciabarra agreed to talk to Insight.

Autonomy seals the deal

Later that same year, as Ciabarra was headed to Boston to meet other potential investors and close the deal, he received a call from Liu-Doyle. “She asked, ‘When is your other meeting tomorrow?’, and I said it’s at 12 p.m. She’s like, ‘Meet me at 10 a.m.’”

Liu-Doyle and Jeff Lieberman, managing director at Insight, took the first flight out to Boston that next morning.

“What struck me about Mario early on was the rare combination of deep technical expertise and incredible go-to-market intuition,” says Liu-Doyle. “Mario coded much of the V1 product himself, and he’s Quantum Metrics’s best salesperson. That level of founder-product-market fit is magnetic. When you see it, you move fast.”

“It was really meaningful to me that they dropped everything to go meet me somewhere,” Ciabarra says. Liu-Doyle remains a close friend and advisor today.

Ciabarra was wary of handing over too much control to an investor — all of the term sheets he received had the same clauses, demanding a final say in future fundraising. He worked with the Insight team to reach terms that were flexible, giving him confidence in the long-term partnership.

“They obviously were a very founder-friendly company, so that piqued my interest,” he said. A glowing recommendation from Nick Mehta, founder of Insight portfolio company Gainsight, “sealed the deal,” he adds.

In September 2018, Insight led Quantum Metric’s $25M Series A. Since then, Ciabarra has leaned on all the support Insight has to offer. “They have been phenomenal in every aspect,” he says.

“You can’t just email these C-level leaders at Fortune 500 companies and get a response. They will only take an introduction from a friend, and Insight has lots of friends.”

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Quantum Metric.

The investor POV

“Part of the magic is that he zooms into the details and the functions, not in a disruptive way, but in a way that brings his founder intuition and credibility to bear.”

When Insight first invested, Ciabarra was asked who he would like on the board — he requested Managing Director Lonne Jaffe, specifically. The pair had clicked instantly: the same age, both entrepreneurial, both product-focused. “It’s really fun going deep into product with Mario; he has such strong technical intuitions and a deep understanding of his users,” explains Jaffe.

Jaffe was previously CEO of Syncsort (now Precisely), a global leader in data integrity. “Lonne is an operator, and he has sat in my shoes,” says Ciabarra. “Lonne knows what my day-to-day looks like.”

“I wanted someone who knew what it felt like to be CEO of a rising company.”

When making senior hires, Ciabarra runs candidates past Jaffe first. “He is very meticulous in the way he thinks and how he attacks specific problems,” Ciabarra explains.

Jaffe found Ciabarra to be a rare blend of engineering expertise and sales acumen. “I remember an Insight Enterprise event where he closed a very large deal while everyone was sipping drinks,” he explains. “He’s just a very unusual combination. Often you have product-centric or go-to-market-centric CEOs, but Mario is fantastic at both.”

Alongside Jaffe’s input, Ciabarra has leveraged expertise from Insight Onsite — a dedicated team of 130+ in-house experts.“When I have things that I’m working on that I’m not quite sure of — like if we need to create a category — we bring in their Onsite team to help us figure out, do we actually want to create a category? What is it going to look like? They help guide us through the pros and cons,” says Ciabarra.

Reflecting on the partnership, Jaffe says: “Some of our founders are better at taking advantage of Onsite than others. [Ciabarra] is in the very top percentile in terms of using the Insight machinery productively.”

“They’d never seen anything remotely like this”

Generative AI became a core part of the business in 2024, which Ciabarra says has been a game-changer. “Lonne has pushed us to really invest in AI and in the data we have, that I don’t think we knew how to unlock, or that it was actually valuable at all.”

As an example, their Felix AI offers session summarization and instant customer context so bottlenecks in the customer funnel can be quickly resolved, and customers are spared from having to repeat their issues and queries to support agents.

“You can use that summary as an ingredient in all sorts of analytics. [Ciabarra] showed this to one of the largest companies in the world, where he had been trying to break into for years, and they were just amazed,” says Jaffe.

Customers now intuitively understand the power of AI to enhance their ability to harness insights. This has reduced the need for Ciabarra and his team to spend time explaining what the products do, and they can instead focus on accelerating sales growth.

In January 2021, Quantum Metric raised $200M in a Series B led by Insight, at a valuation exceeding $1B, making it one of the first tech unicorns of that year. Two years later, the company hit $100M in ARR. According to Ciabarra, Jaffe has played a significant role in helping him hit these milestones. “Lonne has been a strong component of that success.”

The Colorado-based company has been able to grow despite considerable volatility in the U.S. “I don’t know how to describe the emotion,” says Ciabarra. “It just feels really great when everything around you looks rocky, and you’re on this solid ship.”

Today, Quantum Metric captures insights from 50% of the world’s internet users and supports a quarter of the digital enterprises in the Fortune 100, including the top-ranked airlines, telecoms organizations, retailers, and financial institutions.

And with an office in London and growing global reach, Quantum Metric just celebrated its best sales year ever with 40% annualized growth in Q4 of 2024.

“I was in London recently, and it was the most phenomenal experience that I’ve had with our customers and prospective customers to date,” says Ciabarra.”There’s a critical mass you need in any market where people know yours is the brand they need to go with if they want to do digital. Well, I think we finally have that critical mass.”